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A Golden Cake for March

I went to the farm shop this morning for local honey, cream and beef. I bypassed the local (Pershore) asparagus, which seems extraordinarily early and astronomically expensive at £9.30 a kilo. I'll wait until later in the season when the price will hopefully have come down.

Beside the homemade cakes and jams I found these.

Goose eggs at £1.10 each.

I decided to make a weight-of an-egg cake to celebrate this glorious golden March weather we have been experiencing in the UK.

Weight-of-an-egg cake is an old recipe for a simple sponge and the ideal thing to bake with goose eggs as you don't have to guess how many hens' eggs it is equivalent to.

You can of course just as easily make it with hens' eggs if you want.

Simply weigh your egg or eggs and then weigh out the same weight of butter, caster sugar and self-raising flour. My egg weighed 7 oz.

Add a pinch of salt if you are using unsalted butter.

Make sure your butter is soft before creaming it until light and fluffy with the sugar.

Then add your egg. Do this gradually and add a spoonful of the flour as you go if you are worried about curdling. I don't worry about curdling and pour my egg in all at once.

As you can see from my picture a goose egg has a large bright, bright yellow yolk.

Beat the eggs with the butter and sugar mixture well.

Next fold in the flour.

I also added the zest of a lemon but a teaspoon of vanilla extract would be good too.

Your mixture needs to be a 'soft dropping' consistency. This means it falls gently off the spoon. If it slides off at once then it is too runny; if it stays on the spoon it is too thick. In the case of too-thickness you can add a little liquid -milk or water or, as I did here lemon juice. In the case of too runnyness I wouldn't add more flour, I'd bake it anyway, it will still taste nice.

I made some glacé icing with 6 oz of icing sugar and the juice of a lemon. I coloured it with a dab of 'daffodil' colouring paste and finished it off with some primroses which strangely turned out to be precisely the same shade of yellow as the icing.

The interior of the cake was much yellower.

Goose eggs make very yellow cakes indeed.

The children thought I'd put colouring in the cake until I showed them the eggshell.

This post is going to be the first in a series of Cake of the Month posts. I'm hoping to come up with a new cake recipe each month.

* Note you may not need such a big tin if you have less mixture. Or you may need a bigger tin, or two tins if you have more mixture. You may also need to adjust baking times.

Comments

Lovely cake - at the school I work at, we bake every week with the nursery children - and we use the egg weight method when we do buns, using a balance instead of scales - excellent for children who cannot count or recognise numbers, I'd never heard of it before, but it's brilliant.

Re the asparagus, I'm in Yorkshire and picked my first spears from the allotment earlier this week - the mild winter and March's amazing weather probably have something to do with it, but certainly nearly £10 a kilo is a lot of money.

Does a goose egg taste different to a hen's egg? I remember my daughter raving about the duck egg custard she'd eaten on a farm trip but I was never sure whether it was just because it was made from scratch rather than from a powder, or whether there is a distinct difference in flavour. I could imagine them tasting stronger, in a similar manner to their flesh.

Beautiful cake - Pretty Primrose too!I was given a boiled Goose Egg in a teacup (with dippy soldiers too) when I was about three, mum said I eat most of it before I said I didn't want anymore! I was taught to weigh eggs before making a cake by my grandmother. We've been making cakes that way for a few generations. (I always blog cake recipes that way).Julie xxxxxxxx

Looks lovely and simple. We get lots of goose eggs here from a friend's farm so will give it a try. Have to point out Sue as you're a stickler for grammatically correct posts....Shouldn't that be fewer ingredients, not less? ;-) Teehee.

Hell's bells, that's a price for asparagus..........! Lovely looking cake. When we kept ducks we always had takers for the eggs for women who baked and I also found that the eggs made wonderful cakes. I have never used goose eggs so was interested in this post. Thank you.

Well, I had never heard of the egg weight method of making a cake - so where have I been for the past ....... years! Until the other night when I was flicking around the tv trying to find something to watch for about ten minutes before going to bed when I found Martha Stewart making a pound cake - and I didn't know that a pound cake was called a pound cake because each ingredient weighs a pound! Pretty obvious when you think of it! Anyway, your cake is so pretty, perfect for spring and Easter. I look forward to your cake a month.

My Mum did/does make what she calls two-egg cakes, where all ingredients weigh the same as the two hens eggs she uses. I don't think she has ever been more inventive with her choice of egg, but I love the idea of a goose egg cake.

Gorgeous looking cake and simple recipe. I'm sure it tasted as scrumtious as it looked. The primroses were the perfect decoration!Hmmmm, it's put me in a baking mood... that'll mess up my spring diet!I love the transparency of the cake on that first shot!Have a great weekend!